Mac Will Discontinue Printer Manufacturing

Date: February 23, 2010

New York, NY -- According to an article posted on the PC World website, Apple is not likely to ever manufacture printers again. There are multiple reasons for this, but first and foremost, there really isn’t that much money to be gained by manufacturing printers. The real money in printer sales come from the supplies like ink, toner, and paper that are necessary to keep the machines running. At Castle Ink we have talked extensively about low cost printers end up costing you more in the long run because it’s the consumables that keep profits up.

When Apple began manufacturing printers in the first place, it was mainly to ensure that there were solid printers available for their computers. If you travel back in time to the early 1990s, it was a time when operating systems were “so fragmented that every application supported its own graphic printer drivers.”

As operating systems matured and became more graphical and thus, user-friendly, the printer drivers did as well. Because of Apple’s lack of a “‘printing architecture’”, other companies such as HP were developing their own Mac printer drivers which made their products compatible. Thus, when the time came to refocus their company after Steve Jobs returned, printers were an easy cut to make.

Even when Apple was making it’s own printers, none of the technology was native. For the machines, “print heads in its dot matrix printers came from C. Itoh; the inkjet engines from Canon or HP; the laser engines from Canon or Fuji-Xerox…StyleWriters were merely rebranded HP printers built with Apple's logo.”

Basically, because of the large variety and quality of the Mac-compatible printers available in today’s market, there would be no value in an investment in printing.

BY ADAM HAIGH, Editor